Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro, Facultad de Informática, Ing.

De Software
Alcántara Sandoval César Arturo
Expediente: 297134

Brief Transistor story

In 1926 Lilienfeld invented the concept of a field effect transistor, he believed that applying a
voltage to a poorly conducting material would change its conductivity, unfortunately this invention
was not very useful until years later.

After the WW2 Bell labs, this research area was free of projects government, in that year Mervin
Kelly came back with his new interests. Mervin Kelly was a man with an innovation vision, so in
January 1946 Kelly has assembled a team of people, this team was made up of Walter Brattain,
John Bardeen, John Pearson, Bert Moore, and Robert Gibney.

One of the very first and very important contributions made by Bardeen was to understand field
effects. The first idea by Bardeen was applying a voltage to a semiconductor would result in a
change to its conductivity. In November 1947, Bardeen a Brattain made a working transistor, but
until December 16, 1947 they had a working point-contact transistor. During the next six months
Bell labs spent his time in making sure they had necessary patents, in the meantime the military
was threatening to classify this discovery as top secret, fortunately this not happened. In the time
was released to the rest of the world, they no had enough attention because unless you were a
scientist or engineer you don’t how implicate to the new technology. No one could have dreamed
that the transistor would have the broad social consequences it has had.

After Shockley become from his vacations and saw he was not in the invention of transistor, he
began immediately to think about the amplification effect. Shockley, in a great creative burst,
proceeded to write down the theory of the bipolar junction transistor, in fact, kept this idea secret
for some time. John Shive took a very thin piece of germanium an put the emitter and collector on
opposite sides of the crystal. This experiment idea could derive the entire theory of the bipolar
junction transistor. This theory was a major contribution to the transistor, that is equally
important to that Brattain and Bardeen.

Shockley wrote a book titled Electrons and Holes in Semiconductors. This book became the bible
for everyone who wanted to learn about semiconductors. In 1952 the first unipolar device was a
precursor to today´s FET. In the early 1950´s Bell laboratories offered all responsible parties a
license to the invention of the transistor for the price of $25,000 because was under various
consent decrees in those days.

Their first transistor product, which came out in the late 1950’s, was an all-transistor radio. In
1957, Texas Instruments developed the mesa transistor. Then came some very important events in
the late 1950’s. Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments developed the first IC using these mesa
techniques. In some sense, ever since 1960, it has been a story of continuous improvement. It was
almost eight years between the invention of the bipolar transistor and the ideas of how to make
an FET. It took from 1947 to 1960 to get all these pieces in place to start driving the planar process
toward making integrated circuits.
Facultad de Informática, UAQ. Plan de estudios: Ingeniería de Software lunes, 15 de
agosto de 2022